


Do Not Meddle

by acuteneurosis



Category: Original Work
Genre: Bad Jokes, Dragons, Gen, Roommates, Shapeshifting, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:42:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29095215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acuteneurosis/pseuds/acuteneurosis
Summary: There are downsides to moving in with someone you met on the Internet.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 19





	Do Not Meddle

**Author's Note:**

> This is a piece I put together a number of years ago that ended up being the inspiration for a much longer story I am still working on. It's pretty silly and...old. The rework has a more serious tone.
> 
> Prompted by my own roommate experiences and the very weird conversations that I have with my friends.

I admit, I was wrong about her being a cat. Not a real cat, because she looked like a human: the right number of limbs, normal face, probable proportions. It was the almost boneless way she curled up sometimes, compacting with catlike grace, that made me start joking about her not really being human. But given that she was small and harmless and freaking purred if you petted her head, I think I should be forgiven for thinking cat, not fire breathing lizard.

The first time I met her was the day she showed up to move into our apartment. Behind her in the parking lot beneath our second floor unit was a fair-sized moving truck loaded with more stuff than I would have imagined any single person ever needing. “Bast, right?” I asked, opening the door and looking down for the first time into those sapphire eyes. Her smile was all teeth.

“That’s me. You’re Sera?”

“Uh, yeah.” The world suddenly seemed slightly out of focus. I assumed my disorientation was due to it being early in the morning and not having gotten enough sleep yet. Somehow, her smile broadened.

“I told you I didn’t look like a serial killer,” she pointed out as I tried to find anything frightening about her five-foot-nothing, hundred-pound frame. I had made a joke at some point, I remembered, since we had only talked online previously. Something about her being dangerous because for all I knew she could be a thief or a murderer. She had promised me she could fool anyone, but I didn’t need to worry. She’d left that sort of thing behind a few centuries ago.

Yes, that was a bad sign. I should have paid attention. I’m smarter than this most of the time, I swear.

“No, you don’t,” I agreed. “Want to see your room?” She followed me in, investigating the living room and kitchen just inside the door, nodding with approval.

“You took good pictures,” she said calmly. “The space is what you advertised.”

“Is it going to be big enough?” I asked, taking her down the hall, past the bathroom, to her room on the far right. “You brought a lot of stuff.”

“Of course.”

It turns out enough space meant she never actually unpacked all of the stuff she brought with her. She just left it in boxes and mounds as we hauled it up the stairs. Bast insisted on carrying all of the heaviest stuff, and it didn’t seem like she had any trouble moving it, so I didn’t complain. I was actually sort of relieved. Apparently in the real world, being small and female could make you target, something my mom had drilled into my head for years. But I didn’t envy anyone who tried to harass Bast, even before I knew about her belt knife.

And yes, those were more clues that something was off. I should have been paying more attention. But I just didn’t ask. It was like the fact that she never seemed to work and she slept most of the day and was up all night. After someone who details all the mouse castrations they do at their research lab or a person that feels the need to have you vicariously live their sex life, you gain a new appreciation for quiet roommates. Yes, I do not have many friends. Certainly no sane ones.

It turns out Bast and I did share a lot of interests, though. When our waking hours overlapped, we would watch movies or TV shows together, cuddled under a blanket on the couch. It was always cozy because Bast was basically her own heat source.

“Why is movie hair always so perfect?” I remember asking one night, staring at some random hero character fighting through a mob of monsters, his gently waving locks still more or less in place. “I mean, we’re in an age addicted to realism. Why can’t our movie characters ever have real bedhead? Or look properly windswept?”

“You mean like you?” Bast asked, chuckling.

“My hair is completely normal,” I argued.

She patted me on the head. “Yes. Perfectly normal.”

That was when I knew she would get along with my sister. Emily dropped by from time to time to check up on me since our Mom was irrationally paranoid about me being abducted or something. It didn’t help her suspicions that she thought I was lying about having a roommate. No one had seen Bast since Emily had managed to visit twice while Bast was sleeping, and the woman hoarded all of her stuff in her room. They were both eager to see what sort of living companion I had collected this time. And Emily would like having an ally in her campaign against my disinterest in curling irons.

The day Emily came over, I knocked on Bast’s door at the perfectly human hour of 9am. She didn’t answer, so I shoved it open, knocking over one of the stacks of stuff behind it, poked my head in and said in a loud voice, “Hey, it’s time to get up.”

Bast groaned, shifting until she curled around the pile of stuff on her bed instead of lying draped on top of it. “Mmmf.”

“You promised you’d meet my sister. You’ll like her. She’s related to me.”

The stony blue eyes had opened into slits, and I heard her mumble, “It won’t be the same.”

“No,” I agreed. “Because we are different people. Good observation. Now get up. You have just enough time to eat before she gets here. And put on real clothes.”

“I have fake ones?” was the tired reply.

“Emily does not believe in lazing-about-the-house outfits. I’m dressed. You should be too. Or she’ll treat you like a plebeian.”

I left as she mumbled, “I will _not_ be looked down on.”

By the time Bast had stumbled to the table, I had served her up a plate with several strips of bacon and some eggs. She ate the bacon first, making small growling sounds while she did. I didn’t think much about it. I just figured it was part of her tough-girl attitude, like how she insisted on being the one to “hunt down” the meat on our grocery trips.

Look, I got a roommate off the Internet. I knew I was in for some weird stuff. No one’s perfect. And Bast didn’t actually bite Emily when they were joking about how good my sister would taste to cannibals. I agreed with Bast that Emily was too stringy to be an easy meal. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable observation. People make jokes about killing other people all the time.

“She seems nice,” Emily said when I walked her out to her car. “I’m glad you aren’t living alone anymore. Bast looks like she’s taking care of you.”

I snorted, thinking about all of our laundry that I had done, the dishes I had washed, and the meals I’d had to practically spoon-feed her. “She drives me around at night,” I conceded, “when she thinks I’m too tired to be safe. And she’s always the one who answers the door when she’s up.”

“You should bring her to meet Mom. It would make her feel better,” my sister suggested as she slid into her car. I raised an eyebrow.

“Bast’s not really good in company,” I hedged.

“She was just fine with me. It’s just adding Mom.”

“Okay, I guess clawing the tamale guy who drops by every week when she told him not to come back is not the same as being bad with company,” I said, watching my sister stare at me, a bit shocked.

“Yeah, maybe don’t introduce her to mom yet.”

“Not until she’s properly housetrained,” I promised.

Bast’s only comment about the visit was, “Do you encounter cannibals often? Should I be worried about them stealing you?”

I laughed and shook my head. People say funny things when they don’t have enough sleep, right?

It was the smoke that eventually gave everything away, though if she hadn’t been smoking, I probably would have asked about her filing her nails into claws eventually.

The day I came home to find the apartment smelling completely like smoke I finally figured it out. Bast said she hadn’t been cooking and that she didn’t touch tobacco. Or anything else. She wasn’t worried about the smell, so I was the one rifling through the place, trying to find what might be on fire. Which is how I found her pipe.

“What is this?” I demanded when I fished it out from behind the couch cushions. It was a simple pipe with a curved black stem, the bowl one of those red wood finishes. Bast smiled one of her toothy smiles and held out her hand for it.

“Hey, you found it. Where was it?”

“This is yours?” I checked, dangling the offending item between two fingers.

“Uh, yeah.”

“This _pipe_ is yours,” I pressed.

“That would be what I just said,” she agreed, waggling her own finger back and forth in a “gimme” gesture.

“You said you didn’t smoke.”

“I said I don’t smoke tobacco.”

“This looks like a tobacco pipe to me,” I retorted.

Bast sighed, dropping her hand and cocking her head to stare at me for a long moment. Her eyes, always as hard as gemstones, seemed more intense. Like they were lit from behind. “What do you want me to tell you?”

“Why you are smoking _in the apartment_ ,” I said slowly. “And why you lied to me about this.”

“I don’t lie,” was her calm reply. And she sounded too honest to disbelieve, her voice calm and completely steady.

“Then what is this?”

“A prop. I have to practice with it every so often or I lose the trick of getting the smoke to trail out of the pipe. Just puffing smoke rings is easy. Making smoke where there’s no fire…”

Which was when everything fell apart. And made perfect sense. Well, once she added, “I am a dragon, you know.”

I wouldn’t have believed her, but smoke started seeping out from between her teeth and, well, what was I supposed to do? “Stop that!” I shouted. “It reeks.”

“Don’t worry. I already took the batteries out of all the fire alarms.”

“What?” I pressed my palm to my forehead. “Bast, do you have any idea how unsafe that is? Especially with all the crap you own?”

“So you’re okay with me being a dragon?” she asked, wiping grey smudge off her teeth with a finger.

Since I had basically been treating her like a demi-human pet for most of our living together, albeit one that talked, I wasn’t really sure what to say to that. I mean, how was human-shaped dragon that much worse than human-shaped cat? Except for the smoke. “I’m not okay with you casually endangering me so that you can practice fake smoking,” I said at last, “whether or not you are a dragon.”

“It’s not dangerous. I know if there is a fire nearby, and I won’t let something like that endanger my hoard. Or you,” she added as an afterthought.

“Thanks,” I responded dryly. Then what she had just told me really hit me. “Wait. You are a dragon? An honest-to-goodness dragon?”

“Not sure about the goodness, but very honest and yes, very much a dragon.”

I want to make it clear that I did not faint. I certainly had trouble breathing, probably because of the smoke, and I was definitely babbling incoherently for several minutes. But I stayed conscious the entire time. Even if I’m not sure how I ended up sitting next to Bast on the couch.

“Dragon?” I finally managed to ask again. She nodded, patting my hand reassuringly.

She gave me details after that, about herself and others of her kind, but she also swore me to secrecy about it all, so there isn’t much that I can tell. Most of it came down to, well, do you trust the government? Science? Fanboys? And I just couldn’t argue with that kind of logic, no matter how crazy keeping this kind of secret seemed.

“But why are you living here now?” I asked eventually as we sat at the kitchen table, taking spoonfuls of ice cream straight from the carton. Because some revelations require comfort food. She reached out and grabbed a handful of my hair, twisting the waves around her fingers as she pulled them out. The strands held the extra curl, and I scowled, disliking the asymmetry of the one bunch of hair compared to the rest of my head. “I’m going to just brush it out, you know.”

“You always do,” Bast said, sighing a little sadly. “No matter how many times your sister or I try to curl it.”

“Look, I’m just not really on board with your guys’ obsession with my ‘magic princess hair.’” My sarcastic air quotes hovered above my head as I realized what I had just said. I thought about it for a long moment, then said, “No.”

Because I did not need this on top of everything else.

Bast shrugged. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a good princess nowadays? I had almost given up when I found your ad online.”

I spent the next twenty minutes outlining all of the reasons I was not a princess, starting with not being related to royalty. Bast just smiled, her white teeth seeming to have a certain gleam to them.

“I’m a dragon. Trust me. We know.”

I groaned. “Why couldn’t this have happened to Emily?”

“Your sister isn’t a princess,” Bast explained patiently. “Just you.”

“I don’t even want to know how that works. And don’t tell me I’m adopted. I won’t believe you.”

“You weren’t adopted.”

Yes, this made things more confusing. No, I still don’t understand inherent princessitude. I’m still not convinced Bast knows what she’s talking about. But apparently, I was the only princess in my family. Lucky me.

“So what does this mean?” I asked, stabbing my spoon at the bottom of the carton, trying to will more ice cream to appear.

“You mean aside from the fact that no one in your life thinks you can take care of yourself?”

“I can—” She waved my objections aside.

“Can or can’t isn’t the problem. People don’t assume you’re completely incompetent, just that you need to be taken care of. Princesses are like the gems of humanity.”

“And what does that have to do with you?”

“Well, I’m going to have to keep you from other dragons,” Bast said practically. “But that shouldn’t be too much of a problem until one of them finds you. And that’s not going to be easy.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“And of course, there’s the knights. And princes. Can’t let any of them have you either.”

I looked up from my failed attempt at summoning ice cream to glare at the girl across the table from me. “You are not going to sabotage my future love life.”

Bast flicked something out from under one of her claws, inspecting the rest carefully. “No?” she said very slowly. “You do realize that I own you, don’t you?”

Can you blame me for confusing her with a cat?


End file.
